I subscribe to First Round Review, a blog that focuses on “actionable knowledge from the best practitioners” in the start-up world.
I was thrilled—I mean it—when their latest article was on how to write well in the workplace.
Using examples from Churchill, to Google, to Kodak, Dave Girouard—the founder and CEO of Upstart—will give you an arsenal of 8 pieces of advice that if put into practice, will improve your writing.
Enjoy!
An old colleague of mine, Max, recently started a side hustle during the UK lockdowns.
His business idea is really simple: iconic football moments on premium white t-shirts.
His company is called ‘FourFourTee’, a play on words on the classic 4-4-2 football formation.
I love it for a number of reasons:
1. It’s niche and ridiculous. Their target market are 1) football fans, that 2) are also part time history geeks, and 3) also have enough disposable income to want to buy a t-shirt that contains a joke that most people won’t understand. Max has immediately excluded 99.8% of the world from his target market, but for the 0.2%, he’ll have their attention.
2. Minimal design. Each football moment is a tiny logo that sits on the left hand side of the chest—it’s deliberately understated. If you see someone wearing the t-shirt, you have to do some work to get the joke—and that exclusivity has currency.
3. It’s spreading fast. When I heard about FourFourTee, I knew a few of my friends would love it, so I shared it in a Whatsapp chat. Within 5 minutes they had come up with 25 iconic football moments they requested to see on a t-shirt. Products that spark this kind of sharing and chatter grow organically—which is the holy grail of marketing.
4. The business model and its operations are simple. FourFourTee is using a print-on-demand business model. When a t-shirt is purchased on their Shopify website, it is printed by a third party, and sent to the buyer. This means they can offer an unlimited number of iconic football moments without having to tie up any capital in inventory. The trade off is the higher cost to produce each t-shirt, the fact it takes about 7 days from order to delivery, and less control over production quality and return logistics.
Finally, I messaged Max and requested the Maradona ‘Hand of god’ moment from the 1986 World Cup—with Maru being Argentine, let’s just say there are more iconic moments in Argentine football than there are in New Zealand football. Within 2 hours, it was available on FourFourTee’s website, and it should arrive within in the week.
I remember being intrigued by the idea of “Public Goods” in my high school economics class.
Public Goods are products or services provided by governments—usually because there is little to no economic incentive for the private sector to offer them.
Street lights are a great example. Their existence reduces the rate of road accidents—especially for pedestrians. However, despite clearly being a benefit to the public, it’d be almost impossible to find a private company willing to invest in and maintain a portfolio of street lights if they had to collect payment from private citizens. So the government collects taxes to pay for them—they’re a Public Good for the public good.
Which brings me to my musing for the day.
Pre-corona, I’d sometimes sit in the London Underground and think about what proportion of the cost of my travel was 1) paid by my fare, and 2) paid by taxes, grants, or subsidies. (I’m also aware how weird this sounds; but it happens).
I never cared enough to get the data and figure it out, but this article about the closures and re-openings of the New York Subway gave me a little insight into what this split may be, and reminded me why I love Public Goods.
40% of the New York Transit Agency’s operating budget come from fares, and this revenue stream has been decimated by COVID. At the peak of New York City lockdowns, 90% of users stopped using the subway. And even now, usage has only returned to 20% of pre-COVID levels.
It got me thinking. If the New York Transit Agency was a private company, it’d need a helluva lot of cash to survive this pandemic.
However, a government, on the other hand, has the ability to collect taxes and take on debt to see its nation and people through a crisis. It made me grateful for the systems and structures in place to help us all weather this pandemic, from street lights, to subways, to education, to healthcare, and beyond.
I haven’t taken a single day of vacation in 2020.
According to “the plan” at the beginning of the year, I would’ve taken a month in April to get married, and I would’ve also taken a few more days by now to go on small trips.
But, let me tell you, I’m looking forward to the week ahead.
I’m taking the next week off to spend time with books, music, and London’s parks.
I’ve always tried to cram every vacation with a trip—or some other exciting experience. However, given all that’s happened in 2020, I’m happy to be spending it quietly. It’s a welcome change.
Here’s hoping you’re making the time to rest, too—even if it looks a little different to what you had originally planned.
Here’s a fun fact: did you know many of New Zealand’s most progressive laws come by way of a ‘randomisation apparatus’ that’s a 30 year old biscuit tin?
When the New Zealand Parliament has extra space on their order, they debate Member’s Bills—which are recommendations for law changes brought forward by members of parliament.
To ensure fairness, Member’s Bills are represented by plastic bingo counters, and when it comes time to select a bill for debate, a member of the parliamentary service puts their hand into the tin for a lucky dip.
“It’s just what was available at the time,” was the reason given by Trevor Mallard, the Speaker of New Zealand’s Parliament, when asked, “Why a biscuit tin?”
I love how a humble biscuit tin has become a symbol of democracy and progress in my home nation.
It’s impossible to get into the details on every project. Doing so would be exhausting, paralysing, and overwhelming.
So we need to know—and choose—when to be myopic.
I know there are some projects I can’t afford to let slip; so I get into the details on those ones.
But for others, I’m learning how to be comfortable with the 100 ft view, and trusting that my team is well set up for each of us take a separate area of responsibility.
Realising that we don’t need to be myopic on everything is freeing.
A stretch, a cup of coffee, a shower, a made bed, a walk, or a prayer.
Even when we don’t feel like it, there are small actions we can string together each morning to give ourselves a pep talk and say, “Here I am. I’m ready for today.”
Stand close to a Monet, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on.
Take a step back, however, and the water lilies come into view.
Although Monet applied his brushstrokes close to the canvas, it would’ve been impossible to produce his masterpieces without taking a step back and benefiting from perspective.
There’s a lesson in there for us all.
For any given problem, what’s the best answer you can come up with in 1 minute?
How different is the “1 Minute Answer” to the answer you’d come up with if you had hours, days, or weeks?
I’ve recently been experimenting with this idea.
When I’m faced with a challenging question, I start with a blank piece of paper and try to come up with my best answer in 1 minute.
Forcing myself to get to an answer within 1 minute often gives me a strong direction, hunch, or hypothesis to pursue when I do the more lengthy, methodical problem solving.
Perhaps you’ll find the 1 Minute Answer idea to be a helpful forcing function in your problem solving, too! Let me know if you end up using it, and how you find it!
Think about some of the most memorable moments in your life.
How many of them were planned? And how many just happened—or were unexpected?
What’s the split between the two?
What does the split mean for your future decisions?
I’ve been consuming more than my fair share of time travel related stories recently. I previously blogged about Outlander, and since then I’ve been making my way through the German Netflix series, Dark.
Its blurb is, “Children start vanishing from the German town of Winden, bringing to light the fractured relationships, double lives, and dark past of four families living there, and revealing a mystery that spans four generations.”
What I appreciate about Dark is its respect for the audience. The story moves at pace, it leaves clues, but it doesn’t serve answers on a plate. It requires viewers to work and pay attention to detail.
It made me think about how some of the best works of art, music, fiction, and film, make the audience feel smart by requiring them to work for their enjoyment.
H/T to Mark for the Dark recommendation!
What if you had 1 month for that project, instead of 2?
What if you had 12 hours in the day, instead of 24?
What if you only had 30 seconds to land that message, instead of the scheduled 30 minute meeting?
The question is no longer what do we fill the time with, but rather what do we leave out?
The mental exercise of reducing the time available helps us discover what’s most important.
In the past few months, I’ve met dozens of people for the very first time over video conference; many of them starting a new job without ever having set foot in our offices.
In these conversations, I like to start by asking, “What’s your story?”
We’re all human. We all have a story. And questions like this create the space to find the common ground that connect two worlds.
It’s a powerful question, and maybe one you’ll find helpful, too!
Have you ever picked up a book and not been ready for it?
Or how about reading one and wishing you’d found it at an earlier moment in life?
I tried to read The Lord of the Rings when I was 9.
Trainwreck.
But when I was 19, you couldn’t peel me away from the pages of The Return of the King; I was trapped in its prose.
I saw Ryan Holiday’s ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ in 2014 in an Auckland bookstore, but passed on it. Yet in 2017, it became the spark that got me hooked on stoic philosophy.
I believe there is such a thing as Right Time Resonance: the moment a book was destined to meet us—either when we’re ready for it, or when we need it most.
Do you have a book that hit you at either the right or wrong time? Do you think Right Time Resonance exists? I’d love to hear about it!
I’ve been getting back into fiction. The short story, to be precise.
In the last 20 years, we’ve switched our story gobbling habits to over-index on movies, tv series, audiobooks, and podcasts. However, the short story is a remarkable medium, and one that—in my humble opinion—deserves more attention.
Why? Well, in a few short pages, the short story author must make us feel all the emotions that a movie or novel has many hours to accomplish.
I recently came across the excellent story, The Harvest, by acclaimed author, Amy Hempel.
It takes about 5 minutes to read it, but in that short period of time you’ll marvel at the twists and turns, you may discover a new way to tell a story, and you’ll likely question the line between truth and fiction many times over.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!